I’m Mark Ritter, and this is Credit Union Conversations. Today, I’m joined by Austin Wentzlaff from Nook to discuss how credit unions can evolve beyond competitive rates and traditional relationships by using digital tools to deepen member engagement. We’ll explore how Nook takes a fresh approach—focusing on lifestyle topics like travel, health, and relationships—to build trust and naturally drive financial product adoption. Plus, we’ll dive into the role of venture capital in fintech, the challenges early-stage companies face, and what it really takes to bring innovation to the credit union space.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• (00:00) Introduction
• (01:50) Austin shares his professional journey
• (07:36) Austin explains Nook’s purpose and how it operates
• (13:39) How is the industry responding to the premise of Nook’s purpose
• (17:44) What is in Nook’s future and Austin explains the roots of FinTech Accelerator
• (25:16) Discussion of venture capital 

KEY TAKEAWAYS: 

• The credit union industry has thrived on competitive rates and strong member connections, but digital tools now deepen engagement. By focusing on lifestyle topics over direct financial discussions, this approach builds trust and drives natural product adoption.
• Successful early-stage fintechs and QSOs must be innovative, not just marginally improving existing solutions. They should be in a pilot phase with limited clients and employees, and they must be genuinely committed to the credit union industry rather than just exploring it as a potential revenue stream.
• While venture capital provides diversification and reduces risk for credit unions, it can also create a disconnect. Historically, credit unions invested in QSOs they were already working with, ensuring strategic alignment. The shift toward aggregated investment funds may weaken direct relationships between credit unions and fintechs, potentially impacting strategic collaboration.

RESOURCE LINKS

Mark Ritter - Website

Mark Ritter - LinkedIn

Austin Wentzlaff - Nook - LinkedIn

Nook - Website

Austin's Email

BIOGRAPHY: 

Austin Wentzlaff is the Co-Founder & CEO of Nook and brings 10+ years of credit union industry, CUSO, and Fintech startup leadership experience.

Prior to starting Nook, Austin was the Founder and CEO of Fintech Accelerator, a consulting firm focused on bringing new technologies to the credit union industry, whose client list included CUSOs, RenoFi and Illuma, among other successful startups. Prior to founding Fintech Accelerator, he was the Chief Revenue Officer overseeing sales and marketing efforts at OnApproach, a CUSO acquired by Trellance in 2019. He has spent the entirety of his career in the credit union industry, where he has worked exclusively for Fintech startups from the earliest stages of growth through exit. Austin has extensive experience working with Fintech startups as an early employee (joining OnApproach, Illuma, and RenoFi all with less than 10 employees) and a key contributor, instrumental in their early success.  

Austin is an alumnus of Gustavus Adolphus College, where he received a degree in Financial Economics.

CUC Ep. 78 - Relationship Building with Austin Wentzlaff

Mark Ritter: Hello, this is Mark Ritter, your host of. Credit union conversations. Thank you so much for joining me, and hopefully you're telling your friends about this great podcast and your coworkers and whatever you do, please subscribe on your favorite audio network so it comes up in your settings every two weeks and you can listen as you're driving to work.

Austin, thank you for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited. So, yeah, where I'm looking forward to digging into conversation. Austin has a great entrepreneurial background in the world of fintechs and cusso, so I wanted to have him on and talk about best practices and what he sees, and a little bit about what he's up to today.

So Austin, I always like to tell people to kind of give me your origin story of who you are and how you got to doing what you're doing today and your, your timeline. So take it away. You know, you want me to go all the way

Austin Wentzlaff: back to my birth or, or may, maybe high school, so, oh yeah, no. Yeah. So I'm born and raised in Minnesota, small town, Minnesota kid.

There was this nagging itch that I had that was, that was driving me towards entrepreneurship. But also quickly realized that I have negative money coming outta school. I have no idea, and I have no experience to really start a business at this stage in the game. So I figured, how can I scratch that itch without jumping full, blown off the deep end into entrepreneurship?

And that's where I started looking into and finding out more about. This whole concept of startups and being able to join a company at the ground floor, but obviously not, you know, vd, the, the entrepreneur starting the business. So that's how I got my start. I actually kind of accidentally found a company which was on approach.

Found the startup, just so happened to be in credit unions and then that, that shot me into, you know, where I'm at now today.

Mark Ritter: So you, like many of us, you just said, I need a job. I know kind of this general thing and Oh, they work with a credit union. What the heck is that? So.

Austin Wentzlaff: Yeah, it's funny 'cause I actually started this career at Auto Approach as a software tester because I was like, I just wanna get into startups.

I don't actually care about my finance degree or anything like that. Like just get me into startups. And then it just so happened to be that I. It was in the financial, you know, services industry through credit unions. But as I was exploring that opportunity, I was in a money and banking class in my last year of college, and I was like, great.

I have a. $300 textbook to teach me everything I need to know. So I flipped to the index, found credit unions flipped to that page. There's literally nothing about credit unions. It was like two sentences that said these are non-for-profit financial institutions now is about it. So,

Mark Ritter: so I've been in this space.

25 ish years. My son is 20 and is a sophomore in college and just started working part-time for a credit union and I quickly learned nothing. He hasn't picked up a dang thing through osmosis of just being around me all of these times, so I had to give him the credit Union 1 0 1 talk of. What we are and who we're regulated with.

Austin Wentzlaff: yeah. Yeah. It is a fairly unknown, an unknown concept for most people, which we, you think by now everybody kind of understand what they are, but I think there's that, that stigma. Of like, I have to be a member and I'm not a qualified individual to be a member, which, you know, obviously you and I both know that, that's almost rarely a situation where you couldn't work with a credited, but that's kind of what I think a lot of outsiders think when they're thinking of it.

Mark Ritter: Well, and also a lot of the insiders, we, it's old hat for us, so we use industry lingo and just assume everybody knows what the heck a credit union is because we are here and have it every day. And it turns out just a, you know, even those who have members, we have to educate and say what the heck we it is and who we are.

Right. Exactly. SS

And when we got acquired, I said. Okay. I now know I love two things. One of those things is still entrepreneurship, which I thought I loved originally. But now the second thing is this industry, the credit union, you know, in industry and ecosystem is really something that I've grown to love and just the people that are here.

Yeah. Oh, excellent. Yeah. Great group of people. I loved, loved working with them. It was a lot of fun. Both refi and Illumina. I started working with them when there was, you know, around 10 employees or less. Illumina was actually less than five when I joined, so it got a really good opportunity for me to get entrenched in those groups.

And you know, like I said, they're really good people and I was fortunate to work with them. I. And didn't stop working with them for any other reason other than I finally had my own idea, which I was willing to, you know, to jump into the deep end and go full blown entrepreneur into, which was now the formation of Nook.

So we launched Nook about a year, year and a half ago. Really around the premise of just kind of my observation over the last decade plus of being in the industry and seeing what's happening and where I think we're shifting and where we really need to be kind of refocusing and doubling down on our core differentiation points.

So what we do, you know, originally we set out to build what we call the Niche Experience platform, which allows credit unions. To focus more deeply on one core group of members, which we know that they don't have the bandwidth to be able to do that, but we as a QSO can share resources across the industry and be able to figure out a way to really focus in on one core group of members and then build a better relationship because we're super ultra focused on them.

It doesn't have to be geographically bound anymore. But you really have to build that, that focus, and that's where I think QSOs and QSO models come into play.

Mark Ritter: So let's dig deep into Nook for a minute. And I've seen the product and service, but for the people listening, visualize for them, kind of what you're delivering in terms of that helping connect with the membership.

Austin Wentzlaff: For sure. So I think, you know, the first part of it, like I mentioned, is we have to focus on one core group of people. So we wanted to say who is an important member group, and not just for an individual institution, but across the industry, how can we share resources to really figure out what these core member groups are?

But the other thing that we, at least you didn't call

Mark Ritter: me, just the, it lumped me in with the old people group, so

Austin Wentzlaff: thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that that, so that's part one of it. Part two of it is we've actually taken kind of a different approach in which is that we want to talk to these members, not about finance, but about life, which I think fits in nicely to what we like to call the selling without Selling model.

Our whole theory and thesis when we started the company was. If you can talk to these, these individuals about what's relevant to them. So you gotta get niche focused so that you're speaking to one group of people. And then if you go on top of that, talk to them about things that we know are of the most high level of interest to them, like traveling, health and wellness, food and cooking relationships with their kids and grandkids.

So you'll actually increase business by stop, by stopping and talk. Stop talking about the finance essentially. Um, you

Mark Ritter: know, I listen to, I live this every day, much like you, so you know, I, I'm financed 20 hours a day, but as I think of my wife, who we are in that key demographic you're trying to help out initially, all of the things that you listed are what my wife would want to engage with, and.

Be talking about, you know, the importance of life insurance and savings and all of retirements. That's my job in the house. And she would much more want to engage in the types of things you're looking for.

Austin Wentzlaff: You. Well, and the reality of it too is those things are things of interest on a day-to-day basis.

Like even for you and I who both are interested in finance, we only go through financial events in our life very, you know, very rare circumstances. Like the last time I got a loan. Was three years ago. The last time I got a new deposit type of account was, I couldn't tell you how long ago it was, many, many years ago.

Versus flipping it on its head and saying, what does this member actually care about and how can we be a guiding source in their life? Because we know 90 plus percent of the time, they're not actually transacting with us. They don't need anything new, but we can still be there for them. So when they do need something new in three years from now, they're going to think of us first because we've been thinking of ways to take care of them outside of just how we ultimately make money on the transaction side.

Mark Ritter: So what's the reception been like from Credit Union so far in your conversations?

Austin Wentzlaff: It is been kind of mixed. I would say it's been really good in terms of the concept of, of lifestyle. Like a lot of people are recognizing that like, yes, you can only talk to 'em about finance so much, and we're seeing really kind of poor engagement rates because that's the approach we've taken is this, we need to be selling financial products and services.

We need to get the Gen Zs and, and millennials in, which is fine. And we totally understand and appreciate that approach. Our, our, you know, kind of rebuttal back to that as we're not talking about new member acquisition, we're talking about how do you take the gold mine that you've already assembled?

'cause it's very hard to get 50,000 people or a hundred thousand people. To be a part of your business and you've done that, how do you now take that and make more out of it? You know, how do you get that next product into them? How do you get them to be more loyal, bring more money into it? That's where you have to start focusing on the existing member relationships and not just the new member acquisition channels.

Mark Ritter: Yeah. And I see, you know, the, the, the Gen Z crowd and, and it cr it's like nails on a chalkboard when I hear the term gamification.

Oh, we're gonna gamify, like if you gave me an app or service that was gonna gamify, I'd throw it at people. But what I'll call the elder millennial crowd like me, who's over 50. We're still important and ours we're much more into relationships, whereas the younger crowd, I think, is much more into products.

But also the the investments which. Be can be quite lucrative as well, rather than, you know, the, the young folks. So yeah, both are, you know, I, it's kind of like the, the Congress, you know, you can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can work on a few different things. Yeah. It doesn't always have to be for the young people.

So, am I making your pitch on what you're saying?

Austin Wentzlaff: Yeah, exactly. I think, I think that's kind of the core reason why we did what we did is, is what you just said. That. We don't disagree with the strategy to go get younger members, like go do that. That's your new member acquisition strategy. But while you're doing that, you can't throw the baby out at the bathwater.

It's the tell, tell story of the credit union industry like. Your marketing team is now focused on Gen Z member acquisition. That gives them a lot less time and bandwidth to focus on doing existing membership relationship development. So you need a QSO partner like Nook to come in and say, we're gonna run side by side with you.

We're not here to replace anything that you're doing. We're here to be an additive, you know, an added function and run, you know, run with you. So that's kind of the whole idea. And yeah, you hit the nail on the head. That's why Nook is here. Yeah.

Mark Ritter: What are you thinking for the future as you kind of build your empire and qso

Austin Wentzlaff: out?

They've been seeing a lot of success with the platform and we just more recently converted them from being a pilot customer into a paying customer. So like those are all great things to see on your growth trajectory as an early stage company. But while that was happening, we also started getting approached kind of organically with people saying, Hey, I hear what your story is and what you're, what you're accomplishing or trying to accomplish.

We don't necessarily need. The niche experience platform or the 50 plus, you know, specific focus, but we do need the expertise and skills that, that you guys are assembling. Would you be interested in helping us more on a custom, you know, custom basis? And originally I was pretty reluctant to say yes to that.

But I also recognize too that what they wanted, I am personally not the right guy to be their doing the day-to-day execution with them, but I can build a team and get that competency built up. So we actually did spin that up recently, kind of our con consulting division, if you wanna call it that, for the lack of a better.

A better phrase. And we brought in a new, a new person to lead that. So Tiffany Fer was recently hired. She's now our, our president. So kind of my counterpart. And really the, the idea with her is to run the consulting side of the house. So platform, try to get more, more people leveraging vax. And then on top of that, we have these consulting work happening and that actually.

Crack into this code and be more effective with their marketing and also, uh, sales efforts. And then we have some, what I would call industry adjacent partners too. So those like CNY Strategic Services is a client of ours, Cusso, some companies like that that we're working with.

Mark Ritter: So the, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on was to talk about the industry in general.

I.

Austin Wentzlaff: Yeah, so when I started FinTech Accelerator, I really had, I did a lot of that. To your point, like I interviewed with, I can't remember how many different founders, but it was, it was north of 50 and then I narrowed it down finally to Illumina and Reify at, you know, when I started working with these first couple companies and I had to create some strict criteria.

And that criteria was based off of my decade of experience, kind of seeing what's happening. So I had three things that I stuck to. One was, are you early stage enough to get me excited about the upside? And, you know, where I think I provide the most impact is on that super early stage. So that that meant you had a.

Like do you have a load origination system that's a little bit faster? Like that wasn't. Exciting for me. I wasn't interested in that. I wanted to see something new. So like refi got me excited there because they had a new loan type. MBFS is what

Mark Ritter: I call our traditional qso. There's an existing product, we help it out.

We're a support function. It's boring. There's other people who do it. I enjoy it, but it's not, we're not revolutionizing anything. We're taking the industry that's there and helping to provide scale. And there's limits to that. And there's a lot of people who do it.

Austin Wentzlaff: Yeah. And I think there's a, there's obviously a place for that.

Like voice biometrics themselves were not new. They were to credit unions. I had, I knew zero credit unions, that act, that had voice biometric authentication in their call center when I first started talking to Melin and the, and the team there at, at that auma, and then in my third criteria, what was, they had to be truly committed to the credit industry.

So that didn't mean you had to be exclusive. Didn't mean you had to ultimately become a qso, even though all of them that I worked with did. But it meant that like this isn't something you're just trying to experiment with. Because I've seen a lot of companies, especially VC backed companies that come in and they say, look at this industry.

So like that was one of my criteria when I was talking to these guys is like, tell me, tell me straight up, are you actually here because you believe that your technology is meant for the credit industry? Or are you just experimenting and trying to figure out if this is a revenue, you know, revenue opportunity for you or not?

Mark Ritter: So expand the, I've noticed this the last five to eight years is that role of venture capital in the combination of QSOs, fintechs and credit unions. Where, just like you said, a venture capital has a different expectation of speed and reacting to the market versus the old gray mayor of the credit union, versus going out and matching it up with clients who they say, oh, this is nice.

Austin Wentzlaff: Yeah, I think there's definitely an interesting shift to your point in the last, you know, several years and how that looks.

'cause like when I first got started, credit QSOs were individually invested in by credit evens or, you know, so it's not. So that was the whole pro, the whole process. And you had this new rise in, you know, in these DC entities, which I think are great for a lot of reasons. Like I think there is a lot more money to go around because they've de-risked it for the credit union.

In almost every single circumstance I. They were a client first, and then they said, I want to invest in you and I want to be a partner. Like, I'm putting this money in, but we're here, we're working with you. So we had immediate access to the strategic, you know, executives at the credit union to be able to say like, you are an investor.

You're an owner now in this qso. Directionally, how should we be heading? What should we be doing? Uh, and I think a little bit of that might get lost when you have kind of the aggregation of funds and an entity investing versus the individual credit union. But yeah, I think that's kind of what I've noticed is there's the slight shift like that.

So

Mark Ritter: well, Austin, thank you for joining us today. Before we wrap up, tell people how they can get in touch with you, how they can get in touch with Nook if they're interested in talking further.

It's not a super common last name, so you can can find me there and I'll

Mark Ritter: get W-E-N-T-Z-L-A-F-F for those playing along at home. Yep,

Austin Wentzlaff: you got it. So LinkedIn, I try to stay active there. I, I do think there's, there's been a big rise in the industry of a lot of the more innovative folks are spending a lot more time on the LinkedIn platform.

So that's something I've taken note of and tried to be a little bit more diligent myself on that. Otherwise you can contact me using my email too, which is Austin, A-U-S-T-I-N at Nook, NOOK. Dash inc.com.

Mark Ritter: Alright, well thank you for joining us. Thank you for taking some time outta your day and hopefully we wish Nook nothing but the success and let's keep in touch and hopefully we can help each other out.

Narrator: Thank you for listening to the Credit Union Conversations podcast. Have a question. Visit mark ritter.com for more information.